Monday night. First day back at work. I forgot how exhilarating the mix of black coffee and ginkgo biloba can be. I stayed off the stuff for 23 days (must conserve the precious pills!) but ye gods, it feels amazing.
Unfortunately, I also forgot how exhausted you can get after waking up at 7am and staying up till midnight. More later.
Zzzzzz…
Sunday night. Thus endeth the vacation: after 424 miles and eight hours of driving, we’ve made it from rural Quebec to Niagara Falls (the Canadian site, naturally). The AirBnB condo looks like an Instagram photoshoot setting that escaped from 2015, but it’ll do. About half the condos in this three-story building seem to be AirBnB suites. We’re on the top floor, which cuts down the exposure to neighbours.
The drive was mostly uneventful. Xgf and I are still cool and chill and civil, and work fine together as an apocalyptic team. There was just one roadblock when we left Mont-Tremblant, but the two cops were fine when we explained we’d spent a whole month self-isolating by ourselves. As we crossed the bridge from Quebec to Ottawa, we saw that the lane heading into Quebec was completely blocked: there were five or six police cars, sirens all around, and an awful lot of cops (or gendarmes?) collecting overtime by hanging out. I wonder if Quebec has completely blocked all the incoming traffic. That’d make it twice as odd that they let us leave without any trouble. Huh.
It’ll be odd to go back to the work mode in just eight or so hours… Lots of email to catch up on. Video conferences. Phone calls. Back to the old routine.
I look forward to exploring Niagara Falls. If I’m right, the casinos and all the tourist traps are shut down, and the streets will be empty. This is our third AirBnB: Deep River was as rural as rural gets; Mont Tremblant was a tourist trap with an actual little town just a few miles away; Niagara Falls is an actual city. If the streets are empty, and if the stores are closed – and maybe even boarded up – it’ll make for some bizarre zombie movie vibes as we walk around.
The virus news is more of the same old, same old. The most interesting development is that Kim Jong Un appears to be dead: either a botched heart surgery or the virus got to him as well. Nobody knows for sure, but he missed an awful lot of important events, and now it looks like his sister will take over.
Off to bed now… Cumulative deaths as of right now in the US: 55,512; in Canada, 2,687. No new words for the novel.
Saturday evening. All good things… If you’ve paid any attention to what I wrote before, you already know the relationship had its ups and downs. As of today, we’ve officially broken up… Because of the lockdown, we had far more time to discuss our life goals and plans for the far future. There were a few major incompatibilities: she wanted kids, and I didn’t; I wanted to retire early (lean FIRE), and she didn’t. I suppose the main consolation is that by discussing all of this over the course of 43 days, we prevented the loss of months or years if we discovered these major roadblocks later on.
So it goes.
It’ll be odd to be not-really-together as we leave for Niagara Falls tomorrow, for another four-week AirBnB. It’ll be even odder to drive through at least two checkpoints as we leave this little town of Mont-Tremblant, the quarantined locality of the Laurentians, and drive across Ontario on our seven-hour journey. There is, of course, the option of dropping off xgf at her Toronto house and its floating population of 6-10 roommates, but I’m not a monster: the whole point of this odyssey was to keep her safe, and that place is statistically highly likely to be infected. (Her roommates don’t adhere to any distancing/lockdown/quarantine rules.)
Mont-Tremblant was an odd little town. Cute views, confusing mountain-hill things (too short for the former, too high for the latter), and a blatantly fake tourist village with an actual village and an actual town hidden just a few kilometers away. We saw a family of five deer cross the main road a few weeks ago. A few days ago, a fairly small deer walked through the condo complex. (We named him Travis.) This has also been the nicest place I’ve personally ever stayed in, even if I did get a heatstroke from staying in the giant bathtub a bit too long. (In my defense, I thought hot water was good for you.)
…it’s been pretty emotional. Xgf is incredibly empathetic, so this is hitting her hard. I’m more of a robot-human hybrid, so I’ve been compartmentalizing this in tiny little drawers of my mind, since I deal with stress my own way. The next four weeks will be strange.
The world news is just about what you’d expect it to be: weird and getting weirder yet. One thing I hadn’t seen coming is the increase in Beyond Meat’s stock price. (BYND) Granted, at $108.78 it’s still more than 50% down from the 52-week high of $239.71 in July, but it’s also almost doubled from the recent low of $57.99 on March 16th. Fascinating. Ontario has admitted that it’s not tallying the deaths from retirement homes accurately – or on time. (Sure, guys, blame the database.) Trump tried to walk back the Lysol injection comments by saying he was just being sarcastic. (Suuuure.) Meanwhile, dozens of people (at least dozens) in the US ended up seeking medical help after drinking household cleaners. Brazil’s hospitals are getting overwhelmed. Over 20,000 dead in the UK. (Scary, considering their population is only 1/5 of the US.) The virus is spreading in Florida…
Cumulative death toll in the US: 54,030; in Canada, 2,569. New words in the novel: none.
Friday evening. Just enjoying one of the last quiet days before we have to drive to a new AirBnB seven hours away. Not looking at the news, though a friend texted me about Trump’s brilliant idea of chugging/injecting Lysol to cure the virus. I wonder how many of his die-hard fanatics will do just that.
Cumulative deaths: unknown. New words in the novel: none. New symptoms: none.
Thursday night. We might be infected.
Gf’s 22-hour hospital adventure in rural Quebec happened a week ago. One of the hospital employees had a bad cough. Today, she and I woke up feeling slightly worse for the wear. She has a bit of a cough. I have mild chest pain when breathing, talking, or laughing. The cough might be due to the dust in this condo. (We never vacuumed because there were no vacuum bags.) The chest pain might be due to something random, maybe. Possibly. Hopefully.
A week-long incubation period fits right in with most people’s observations. It’s possible that this is a nothing-burger and we’re just too worried. It’s possible that this is serious. We’ll wait and see how the symptoms develop. We don’t have a working thermometer, and there are no oximeters for sale online – at least none that are reliable. (Products with just a single fake review are easy to spot.) Gf’s Apple Watch allegedly has the oximeter functionality, but it’s not a supported feature.
Gf and I are committed to slowly working things out. Her therapist has thawed from the “dump him” position and recommended a good book on the attachment theory. That should make for some interesting reading.
As an experiment, I’m avoiding all the news for 48 hours to see if the underlying anxiety levels will go down or remain the same. Death counts in the US and Canada: unknown. New word in my novel: just 282.
Wednesday evening. The work project that I’d spent most of my vacation checking up on has been rescheduled for some later, indefinite date. Now I’ll get to enjoy my three days of vacation in peace. Heh.
Another fight with gf. I’m the immature and less self-aware one in this relationship: said a dumb thing, then kept saying dumber things and digging a deeper hole for myself. Her therapist told her to dump me. Her I-Ching told her to be like a wanderer. Her Tarot told her it’s about emotional depth and maturity.
I can’t tell if this is all because we’ve spent 40 days locked together, with no other people and no time apart – to the point where we’re both getting on each other’s nerves, and time apart (or just physically leaving for work) would help. Or maybe it’s that there are legitimate incompatibilities that we would’ve found months or years down the road, and this 40-day-long lockdown is helping us discover those permanent structural faults ahead of schedule, saving us both time, though not nerves.
I know that outside these windows, the world is getting progressively worse. Thousands are dying every day. Millions may starve as bottlenecked supply chains start to collapse. The world will never be the same. I’m aware of all that, and of how damn petty and insignificant it is to complain about work delays or personal relationships in a time like this. Compared to the giant global tragedies, these personal little tragedies and disappointments are nothing – but they still feel huge to those of us who experience them. History is made of individuals. This pandemic’s chronicle is made up of over seven billion voices and countless stories, no matter how mundane.
Cumulative US death total: 47,861. In Canada, 2,081. My novel: zero new words, obviously.
Tuesday evening. Just another quiet day – we’re both taking it easy, doing our own thing. Gf had a big fight with a close friend, and after that, and the hospital visit, and our discussions about the future, she needs time to process it all.
Oil crashed. Hard. I may have lost some money. I may have started to reevaluate what I do with my money and why incessant saving isn’t the most fulfilling strategy.
The world is still offline. Someone, somewhere, has started the first human vaccine trials. If it succeeds, that will be the beginning of the end. If it doesn’t, and once the impact of the unemployment surge and the bad future-looking guidance gets priced in, that’ll be just the beginning – at least for the world economy. Canada may start seeing beef price increases (if not shortages) after some major processing plants reduced their output. That’s one way for us all to switch to vegetarianism, I suppose.
Cumulative death toll in the US: 45,139; in Canada, 1,892. My novel: 958 new words.
Monday evening. Trying to make the best of my staycation, even though I have to spend at least an hour a day on a big work-related presentation that just happened to get scheduled while I was supposed to be away. I know how spoiled I sound, while over 22 million Americans have lost their jobs, tens of thousands are dead, and everyone is locked together – and yet my biggest problem is that my long-awaited vacation isn’t relaxing enough. Heh. By my guesstimate, there’ll probably be two good consecutive stress-free days before this week is done. And then… A two-week vacation in July, perhaps?
Gf and I are mending bridges and doing better. Nice long walk today to the local waterfall. Our greatest selfie yet, in the light of the slowly setting sun.
World war oil is getting a little bit ridiculous: for the first time ever, the price of the US oil future contracts went into negative territory. Everyone is righteously freaking out. Things should improve a bit after tomorrow’s contract expiration date, but who knows anything at this point? The demand is low and all the storage is filled up. What a strange world.
Georgia’s governor is reopening just about every public space (gyms, bowling alleys, etc), thus sabotaging all the efforts of most of the other states. A sleuth on reddit found out that all the “liberateFL” (etc) sites were created by one guy in Florida. Their nationwide protests are pretty tiny, and the signs they wave are mass-produced and printed out, with sharpies added on top as an afterthought. …and yet they’re getting more media coverage than giant climate change protests.
Cumulative death toll in the US as of right now: 42,677; in Canada, 1,731. My novel: 454 new words.
Sunday night. Funny how we always jinx ourselves. Today was designated as a truly relaxing day of my staycation, yet it ended with a giant emotional conversation (not a fight) about my not wanting to have children. It wasn’t until three hours later that we figured out that the timeline gf meant was five years down the road, not within a year.
Ho hum. Gf’s Tarot card draw on us continuing our relationship: the “spiritual reawakening” card for me; the death card for her. Ho hum x2.
World news: more people dying from coronavirus. Stay tuned for more world news as our coverage continues.
It’s Saturday night, and all is well. Gf got released from the hospital on Friday night: a full battery of blood tests and X-rays didn’t find anything unusual, though the docs admitted they didn’t have the expertise to figure it out. I’m impressed that their rural hospital actually had the CT scan capability – they’ll let us know the results once they’re ready. The upside is that gf is well, her kidneys and heart are healthy, and no one is in danger of dying. The downside is that we still don’t know what exactly is wrong, and we may have been exposed to covid while in that hospital. So it goes.
We’re back to normal with binge-watching TV shows, talking about life after the pandemic, having chill and civilized discussions about some of the big post-pandemic life plans we diverge on, etc. It’s good to be back to normal.
Meanwhile, for two days running, the daily covid death toll in the US has exceeded that of 9/11. I hate being right… My facebook pal and I had that disagreement less than 3 weeks ago, and it’s gotten so much worse. There’s more crazy randomness in the news: Hawaii has closed its beaches while Florida has reopened theirs. Frozen pizzas are getting rationed in some stores around the US. According to the radio (the hospital was a 40-minute drive away), Quebec is getting military assistance starting today, Saturday. They made it sound like the military will help only with retirement homes, but I suspect they’ll do more if there’s a need to do so.
Cumulative death toll in the US as of right now: 39,116. (Holy shit, it was just 28,628 when I checked two days ago…) In Canada, it’s 1,521. Just 245 new words in my book today – I really ought to set up a specific time slot to actually write.
Stay safe, fellow hermits.
Grigory Lukin.com 